In support of traffic safety applications, vehicular networks should offer a robust Medium Access Control (MAC) layer protocol that can provide a reliable delivery service to safety-related messages. As the safety applications generally use broadcasting to propagate their messages, a reliable broadcast protocol is essential. In general, however, broadcast is considered as unreliable by nature in contrast to unicast. This paper introduces a novel MAC protocol, called a Hybrid Cooperative MAC (HCMAC), which can substantially enhance the reliability of broadcast in vehicular networks by employing a notion of channelization. HCMAC introduces a hybrid protocol that combines a time slot allocation of Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA) and a random-access technique of Carrier Sense Multiple Access (CSMA) and thus minimizes the probability of data collisions. In addition, its feedback strategy further enhances the system performance by preventing transmissions during time slots that experience collisions. Through analysis and simulations, we compare the performance of HCMAC with VeMAC, an existing TDMA protocol. The results demonstrate that HCMAC can offer substantially faster channel access and lower collision rate compared with VeMAC.
Time synchronization is an essential issue in industrial wireless sensor networks (IWSNs). It assists perfect coordinated communications among the sensor nodes to preserve battery power. Generally, time synchronization in IWSNs has two major aspects of energy consumption and accuracy. In the literature, the energy consumption has not received much attention in contrast to the accuracy. In this paper, focusing on the energy consumption aspect, we introduce an energy-efficient reference node selection (EERS) algorithm for time synchronization in IWSNs. It selects and schedules a minimal sequence of connected reference nodes that are responsible for spreading timing messages. EERS achieves energy consumption synchronization by reducing the number of transmitted messages among the sensor nodes. To evaluate the performance of EERS, we conducted extensive experiments with Arduino Nano RF sensors and revealed that EERS achieves considerably fewer messages than previous techniques, robust time synchronization (R-Sync), fast scheduling and accurate drift compensation for time synchronization (FADS), and low power scheduling for time synchronization protocols (LPSS). In addition, simulation results for a large sensor network of 450 nodes demonstrate that EERS reduces the whole number of transmitted messages by 52%, 30%, and 13% compared to R-Sync, FADS, and LPSS, respectively.
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